Bouquet Best Friends

Choice isn’t always a good thing. With so many online wine shops popping up at the moment surfing the web for your favourite drop can be as confusing as the supermarket wine aisle. Which is why it’s a relief to introduce you to dropwines, a new online wine retailer who believes that less is more by focusing on offering ten wines a week that they promise will taste as good as they’re priced.

I took five minutes with wine buyer in chief Richard Verney to explain what they’re up to and why, if you know what you’re looking for, he could offer you much more than just a bottle of wine…..!

.A great friend of mine doesn’t need to come to The Thinking Girls’ Wine Night. She already knows exactly what wine she likes. She started her love affair with wine earlier than most when she worked at one of Raymond Blanc’s restaurants up north. After some initial flirting with Viognier she found her true love was Sancerre, the crisp, zingy style of Sauvignon Blanc from north west France that makes your mouth salivate with pleasure.

She has good but expensive taste and as a big fan of Sancerre myself she tasked me last summer with finding one for her where quality and price were not mutually exclusive. Tricky. ………

It was some time ago that Miss B first asked me to write a BBF column (Bouquet Best Friend) for her and I apologize for taking so long. There are no excuses, just simple hesitation while I questioned whether I knew anything about wine worth writing. I’m still not convinced I do, however I feel that I am exactly the sort of person that Miss B is targeting and so hoped that if I explained my position and wine frustrations to you now you may relate in some way to me and further understand what Miss B is trying to do…

Introducing Gavin Williams from www.wineoftheweek.co.uk, the first male writer brave enough to become a Bouquet Best Friend!!

A giant wine barrel capable of holding 144,000 litres of wine has been refilled for the first time in 400 years.

The super-sized barrel sits within a German hunting mansion in the Saxony-Anhault town of Halberstadt. According to the Guinness Book of Records it’s the world’s oldest giant wine cask measuring five metres in diameter and weighing in at a whopping 63 tonnes.

Work commenced on the cask in 1592 and was completed two years later in time for the wedding of the Duke of Brunswick to Princess Elisabeth of Denmark. Reportedly it took them twelve years to drink the cask dry after which it fell into neglect.

Introducing Petit Willow, she knows a thing or two about dating and vino!

Bonjour Spring!

There’s nothing like Spring to get you in the mood; considered the season of procreation and of course warmer weather it’s the perfect time for singletons everywhere to start fishing the dating pool with renewed energy!

Dating etiquette itself should come easily to people with good manners. Don’t swear. Don’t get too drunk and lose control of your bladder…… Choose a comfortable place to meet but don’t over analyze where to go. How long do you spend choosing the ‘venue’? Too long I expect. And how long do you spend looking at the wine list? Not long enough? I thought as much. ………

Before I start I must confess; I don’t know much about wine but I do know one thing, and that’s what I like. So, here goes… Over the last few months I’ve been working too hard and not playing enough, activity which has left my wine racks feeling unloved. Luckily with a bit of help from my partner, my mum and a week off work I soon took the load off the racks! ………